This has been a big week for the Supreme Court. In four separate cases, it applied stricter
scrutiny to racial quotas and preferences in higher education, overturned part of the Voting Rights
Act, ruled unconstitutional the Defense of Marriage Act and dismissed an appeal of a lower-court
decision overturning California voters’ ban on same-sex marriage.

At the same time, it pointedly declined to declare that there is a constitutional right to
same-sex marriage.

There were victories and setbacks here for political and cultural conservatives and for
political and cultural liberals.

Only one of the four cases was decided by the familiar 5-4 split between supposedly conservative
and supposedly liberal justices. In the other three, as often this year, there were different
lineups.

The common thread I see is that this is a court that mostly has tried to keep the three branches
of the federal government and the states from interfering with each other.

This was arguably true in Fisher v. University of Texas, the case on racial preferences in
college and university admissions. The decision was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who had
dissented from the 2003 decision allowing quotas.

But this week, Kennedy declined to rule them out altogether, as Justice Clarence Thomas urged.
Rather, Kennedy said courts should apply “strict scrutiny” to preferences which must be “narrowly
tailored,” as he argued in his 2003 dissent.

The decision may discourage schools from employing racial quotas, and it could lead them to
consider giving preferences to disadvantaged applicants not classified as black or Hispanic. That
could mean less litigation.

The court did strike down a federal law — Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act — in Shelby County
v. Holder. That provision requires certain states and localities, based on low black turnout in
elections between 1964 and 1972 (mostly but not all in the South), to get “preclearance” from the
federal Justice Department of any election-law changes.

The criteria make no sense today and Congress should write new ones, Chief Justice John Roberts
wrote. The problem is that today, black turnout rates are higher than white ones in Mississippi,
while the state where they lag the most is Massachusetts.

So Congress may not be able to come up with new criteria. That would mean less federal
interference with the states. Individuals and the Justice Department still can sue under Section 2
to stop racial discrimination in voting where it exists.

The Defense of Marriage Act, signed by Bill Clinton in 1996, bars the federal government from
recognizing same-sex marriages authorized by states, and allows states not to recognize same-sex
marriages from other states. It was overturned 5-4 in U.S. v. Windsor, written by Kennedy.

That means that same-sex couples can file joint federal tax returns and qualify for the spousal
exemption in federal estate tax.

It may mean that same-sex couples can get divorces in states that don’t allow them to marry. It
may overturn any state law barring same-sex couples from adopting children. Other wrinkles are left
to the states to sort out.

But the court was unwilling to impose same-sex marriage on states that don’t want it. That was
the practical effect of Perry v. Hollingsworth, which left in place a California federal
appeals-court decision overturning California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.

The state declined to defend the law on appeal, and Roberts wrote that the private parties who
appealed lacked the standing to do so. He got the votes of the unusual coalition of justices
Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

Ginsburg supports Roe v. Wade but has spoken with some concern about the furor the court caused
by legalizing abortion across the nation. She and some colleagues may have dreaded a similar furor
if the court legalized same-sex marriage everywhere.

The practical effect is that California now has same-sex marriage. But polls indicate that
California voters stood ready to reverse Proposition 8’s narrow 52 to 48 percent margin if the
issue again got on the ballot.

These decisions, which tend to restrain branches of government from interfering with each other,
were the product of no single coalition. No justice voted with the majority in all four cases, but
each voted with the majority in two or three. A thought-provoking session.

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.